A tattered scrapbook and a handful of 8mm movies are like gold to John Schneider’s family.
The grainy images of a smiling Schneider are all they have left to remind them of the happy days when he was alive, days that were forever taken from this family by one man’s murderous act.
Schneider, a Winona County Sheriff’s Office investigator of 22 years, died from a rifle blast to his chest September 7, 1980 after he responded to a domestic disturbance at a mobile home in Goodview.
His killer, a man named John Kirch, was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. But Kirch thinks he has served long enough and on June 14 will ask a parole board to set him free.
John Schneider’s family says no way. They believe a cop-killer sentenced to life in prison does not belong out on the streets of society, ever, and they are about to implore that same parole board to agree with them and keep Kirch behind bars.
Most frustrating for the Schneider family is that the laws now agree with them, but the laws at the time of Schneider’s murder were much more lenient. Today, someone sentenced to life in prison for the first degree murder of an officer would never be paroled. But in 1981 when Kirch was convicted, life in prison only carried a mandatory 17 years, with a parole board to determine a prisoner’s eligibility for release thereafter.
This is the second time Kirch has asked for parole, the second time the family will rally together hoping to make prison officials understand what this man did to their family and the community and why he should not be free.
But this is the first time in 24 years the family has agreed to tell the media their story, opening their hearts to help people understand how much worse off they believe the world is without John Schneider.
It was a sad affair on the back porch of the quaint home John and Jean Schneider built for their family. There, John’s widow, children and grandchildren gathered to talk about what it was like living with John, and what it is like living without him.
All but one of his grandchildren are too young to have known him, talking instead of the empty spot in their lives where a grandfather would otherwise be.
But for older family members, the memory of John’s personality made them laugh out loud, and the memory of his death made them cry bitter tears, even after 24 years.
John was the kind of guy you wanted to be around on a bad day, his family said. He was funny, really funny, and he loved a good prank.
John’s daughter, Lori, brought gales of laughter from family members when she reminded them of the time John and Jean were out motorcycle riding and accidentally turned onto a street in Nelson into the middle of a parade. But rather than make a hasty exit, he continued on through the parade route, smiling and waving at people while Jean tried to hide on the back. He was just like that, they laughed.
When Lori and son-in-law Jon Meyer had John's first grandchild, Scott, he doted on the boy. John would walk in the house, Lori said, and just take Scott and go. "I'd say, 'Dad, where are you going?' and he'd say, 'Don't you worry about it.'" Usually, Lori said, he'd take Scott to the grocery store and, at two and a half years old, let him pick out whatever he wanted. While he cruised the aisles with the toddler, his running gag, if anyone asked, was to tell them he'd finally gotten one more baby out of Jean.
Jean became an unwilling widow just two years before her husband was set to retire. They had spent two decades living their life around his work schedule, and were looking forward to the lazy days ahead. In the meantime, they made do. "When he was on night patrol, every seven weeks he'd get a Saturday night off and we'd go to the Legion if they had a dance," Jean said. "Boy that was the highlight of our life." One night a waitress asked them if they were newlyweds because they seemed so happy, Jean said. They had been married for not quite 20 years.
"That's what you live on, all those good memories," she said sadly. "That's all I've got."
While he was a fun guy, his son Tim said, he also had a serious side where his faith and compassion ran deep. He never went to work without his rosary in his pocket or a positive thought about what he could accomplish, and he tried to impart that same philosophy to his children. "He always said everything happens for a reason, but I can't figure out what the reason is for this," Lori said.
John had a special brand of compassion for kids, giving out his number and offering them his ear whenever they needed it. "I remember answering the phone a lot and it was a kid asking for my dad," Lori said.
John was talking about changing positions in the department to become a juvenile officer, Jean said. Chief Deputy Vern Spitzer, one of the officers who accompanied John to the domestic call the day he was killed, told Jean it was the last thing John talked about in the car on the way to the call.
John's desire to help children is a bittersweet memory for the family, because they know it is probably why he went into the trailer first. There was a baby inside.
Brenda Kirch called police on the morning of September 7 to say her husband had taken a swing at her and forced her out of the couple's mobile home at 15 Ontario Lane in Goodview. The couple's 15-month-old child remained inside, so Brenda called the police.
Media accounts of the trial say Spitzer contacted Winona County social worker Darrell Warnke, who told him John Kirch might present a danger to the child. Warnke told Spitzer John Kirch was accused of having sexual intercourse with a 12-year-old relative during the past three years, and was rumored to have a .22 caliber rifle in the home, although Brenda had told Warnke she believed the gun was partially taken apart. Spitzer said at trial that Brenda told her husband she was going to call the police, and that he replied that he would blow away anyone who walked through the door.
When Schneider, Spitzer and Deputy Ted Larson repeatedly knocked and identified themselves, Kirch would not come to the door. Schneider forced the door and entered first, making it only as far as the hallway before he shouted, "Look out Vern, he's got a gun," and a shot rang out. John Schneider fell to the floor, shot once in the chest. Forty minutes later, Kirch surrendered and handed over the baby.
Meanwhile, at the Schneider house, Jean, Lori and son-in-law Jon were waiting for John to come home for lunch. "Hot dogs," Jean said. "And ABC-123s," Lori added, "I'd just opened the can."
As in many police families, a scanner was always on somewhere, and they all froze when they heard it: "Officer Down." "I said to Lori, 'Dad!'" Jean recalled. "I didn't know where it came from, but I just knew."
"I told her, 'No, Mom, that scanner picks up a signal from all over,'" Lori said through fresh tears, "but I went in the basement where my mom couldn't hear me and called in. They said they couldn't give out any information."
Jon jumped in the car and headed for the address that had been given over the radio: 15 Ontario Lane, but it was so barricaded by emergency vehicles he couldn't even get close. Jon shouted to an officer running by with a shotgun, "Where's John Schneider?" "They took him to the hospital," the officer shouted back.
In the meantime, a woman who knew the family pulled up at Schneider's house and said to Jean and Lori, "What are you guys doing here? You need to get to the hospital," Lori said. On the way to the hospital the woman said she heard from someone close to the scene that John had been shot, but she knew nothing more.
With everyone gone from the Schneider home, an unaware Tim had arrived to do a favor for his dad. "I was out front washing his motorcycle so it would be shiny when he came home in case he wanted to go for a ride," Tim said. When the phone rang and someone on the other end told him he needed to get to the hospital, Tim asked why but said in his heart he already knew.
At the hospital, family members said, things were chaotic. No one told them what was happening, but nurses kept offering them Valium. They didn't know if John had been shot in the foot or the heart, and so, numb, they huddled together and waited. Soon officers were streaming in, many crying. But Vern Spitzer was not there right away, Jean said, because she learned he had gone home to change his blood-soaked clothes before seeing them. Her husband's blood, she said dully.
Finally, after what the family believes was probably an hour, a doctor came out and said plainly, "He didn't make it." Later, Jon said, doctors apologized for the abrupt announcement. In the confusion they didn't realize the family hadn't been told about John's grave condition.
Someone came out and handed Lori John's belongings: his wallet, his jewelry and the rosary they had found in his pocket.
Later, Lori read the autopsy report and learned that a single rifle slug had pierced her father's heart, and doctors had unsuccessfully tried every method at their disposal to save him.
The image of that gunshot wound troubles Jean beyond words even today. "He shot him right here," she said, putting her fist to her chest, "right in the middle of his white shirt. He was dressed up because he was an investigator. All the shades were drawn on that trailer; he was like the perfect target..." Jean's last sentence trails off, and she looks sad.
"You can ask me what I did for the next three or four years and I couldn't tell you," she said. "It's a complete blank."
Recollections of the funeral are hazy for Schneider's family. "We were all eating Valium out of the same bottle," Jean said. But through their grief, each has specific snapshots, isolated moments burned in their memories.
For Lori it is the image of a single Marine leading the funeral procession. Being a Marine was something her father cherished, Lori said, so before the funeral she approached the Marine recruiting office in town and asked how to get a full Marine accompaniment for her father. The lone recruiter staffing the office said there was not enough time to get a group together, but he closed the office, pulled out his dress whites and came himself.
Imprinted in Tim’s memory forever is a woman seated alone in the back of the church at John's funeral. Her bedraggled appearance was stark in comparison to the crisply uniformed officers and finely dressed friends and family, Tim said, so they sent an officer to ask her who she was. "He came back and said Dad had bought her groceries once when she didn't have enough money to feed her kids," Tim said.
His family knew John did things like that all the time, Lori said, going back many years when the Schneider home became a regular stop for hobos riding the rails through town. At first there were a few by chance, and then many as word spread, because John always brought sandwiches and coffee into the alley for them while he listened to tales from their travels. If they needed new shoes, he gave them some of his own, his son Tim said. John was just like that.
But the family had no real appreciation how much John was like that until the funeral, where strangers came out of the woodwork to say goodbye to a man who had touched them somehow.
And everyone in John’s family was awed by the number of law enforcement officers who came from across the Midwest to pay tribute to the only law enforcement officer ever gunned down in Winona County. When the family rounded the corner near the church, they were greeted by the sight of hundreds of law enforcement officials waiting outside, their cars like a sea around Cathedral of the Sacred Heart. Jon can still hear the hollow sound of the church as hundreds of guns clinked on the pews when they rose and sat.
And during the funeral procession through town, Jean remembers the sight of a man who dropped his bicycle on the ground and saluted somberly at the stream of cars that ran as far as the eye could see.
Little memories like that are the only clear images they have.
Even grandson Scott, who was not yet three, has a memory of standing near the garage listening to his father try to explain something about his grandfather and the funeral. "That was the hardest thing I've ever had to do," Scott's father, Jon, said. "He asked me when Grandpa was coming back, and that's when I lost it."
Now Scott's wife Wendy is pregnant with what would be John's only great-grandchild if he were alive, and Scott is sad that it is yet another rite of passage come and gone without his grandfather. "Every time something big comes up in my life I think about it. I wish he could see it," Scott said.
John's other grandchildren feel equally cheated; they didn't even get two and a half years with him. "I wish he was here, I wish I knew him," grandson Rick, 22, said. "I've been thinking about getting 505 tattooed on my ankle." Now permanently retired from the sheriff's department, 505 was John's call number.
John Jr., 22, and his grandfather’s namesake, shares the same interest in cars and motorcycles that John Sr. did, although he'll never have the chance to tune an engine with his grandfather's help.
Joe, 18, is also good with cars, is tall like his grandfather, and likes the idea that he might be kind of like the man he has only heard of and never known.
Tiny three-year-old Lexi doesn't understand what happened to her grandfather, but she knows who he is. She surprised her parents, Tim and Joanne, one day when she pointed at an old newspaper photo and announced, "That's Grandpa John."
John's family keeps him close by wearing bracelets inscribed with his name and dates and the initials "EOW," which mean "end of watch." But they hardly need a bracelet to remember. Every time a clock reads 5:05, or they hear a siren, or the roar of a motorcycle, he is right there, they said.
But for Jean, who has never remarried or even dated since her husband was killed, sometimes those fresh reminders of John hurt more than they heal. "Since it happened, I don't really have any new memories, I live on what I had," Jean said. She knows her children have done a better job than she of grieving, she said, but often times for her the memories of her loss just hurt too much to feel. "If I sit too long and feel it coming back I get up and move around," she said with a dry smile.
Out of Jean's earshot, Tim said men have expressed interest in Jean over the years, wanting to walk her to the car after church or bringing her vegetables from their gardens, but she wants no part of it. "She has just always said that Dad was the one and only for her. She's not interested in being with anybody else," Tim said.
And actually, closure is not a word that anyone in this family buys into. You cannot heal a wound that gets reopened every few years for a parole hearing, they said. "Going in for these parole hearings, you feel like you're at the edge of a cliff and you're going to get pushed over. Now we're back at the cliff again," explained Jon.
And besides, Jon said, Kirch has never made any attempt to apologize to John Schneider's family for killing a man they love dearly. Although they are not interested in his remorse anyway, they think it is telling about Kirch that 24 years have passed without an apology.
If John's children could tell their dad one thing, it is that they are not going to give up on justice. "People think it's over and done with, but it's not. Who was Kirch to take him away?" Lori asked. "I'd want him to know we're still fighting for him and going to keep this guy in there. Kirch didn't just take our dad, he destroyed our family."
Put bluntly, if John's children could choose, they would have had the single bullet fired from their father's gun as he fell find its way to Kirch's heart. That would have been fairer, they say, than Kirch having the opportunity to walk free and enjoy life again while their father is in a grave.
For Tim, it is hard to not get angry over the possible parole of a cop killer. "Cops are there to protect and serve us, why are you going to let this guy out? What are we going to do without cops?"
"Why should he get parole?" Lori and Tim both asked. "My dad doesn't get parole," Lori said. "Kirch sent him where he is and it's not fair. Why doesn't life in prison mean life?"
The Schneider family and Winona County Law Enforcement officials are asking that community members who support their efforts to keep Kirch incarcerated send letters for consideration by the parole board at the June 14 parole hearing. The board will review community feedback as well as the family’s statements in making their determination for parole. Letters must be signed, but will remain confidential from Kirch.